I don’t answer him, because he wants me to say yes—yes, I’ll let him protect me. Yes, I’ll let him protect us. And I’m not going to say that. I’m not going to say it because I know this much is true: he can’t.
Nicholas can probably get to us anyway, if that’s what he wants to do. That’s what this all has taught me. One way or another, things come back. Things just came back. So I may as well take a shot at doing the best thing for Bailey. And, by doing it this way, Bailey gets to stay Bailey.
No one gave her that choice before. She is already losing so much. The least I can do is give it to her now.
Grady starts the car up again, heads back into traffic. “You can’t trust him. It’s crazy for you to think you can. You cannot make a deal with the devil and expect it to turn out okay.”
I turn away from him, look out the window. “Except I just did.”
Finding My Way Back to Her
Bailey sits in the conference room. She is crying hard.
And before I even reach for her, she jumps up and races toward me. She holds tightly to me, her head in the crook of my neck.
I hold her like that, ignoring Grady, ignoring everything but her. She pulls away, and I take in her face, her eyes swollen from crying, her hair sticking to her head. She looks like the little girl version of herself, needing more than anything for someone to tell her that she is safe now.
“I shouldn’t have left the room,” she says.
I push her hair off her face. “Where did you go?”
“I shouldn’t have gone anywhere,” she says. “I’m sorry. But I thought I heard a knock on the door, which completely freaked me out. And then my cell phone rang and I picked it up. And there was all this static. I kept saying hello and getting that static. And so I went into the hall to see if I could hear any better, and I don’t know…”
“You kept going?” I say.
She nods.
Grady shoots me a look, like I’m out of bounds to comfort her. Like I’m simply out of bounds. This is how he sees things now. His plan for Owen and Bailey is on one side of a line and I’m on the other. This is the only way he sees me now—as the main impetus toward his imagined solution.
“I thought it was my father on the phone. I don’t know why. Maybe it was the static, or the blocked number. I just felt it strongly that he was trying to reach me and so I thought I’d walk for a minute, see if he tried me again. And when he didn’t, I just… kept going. I didn’t think too much about it.”
I don’t ask her why she didn’t at least let me know before she left that she was okay. Maybe she didn’t trust that I would let her do what she needed to do. That was probably a part of it. But I knew the other part wasn’t about me, so I decide not to make it about me now. It’s never about someone else the moment you realize it is up to you to get yourself to a better place. It’s only about figuring out how to get there.
“I went back to the library,” she says. “I went back to campus. I had Professor Cookman’s roster with me and I just started going through the yearbook archive again. We ran out of there so fast after seeing the photograph of… Kate. And I just thought… I thought I needed to know. Before I left Austin.”
“And did you find him?”
She nods. “Ethan Young,” she says. “The last guy on that list…”
I don’t say anything, waiting for her to finish.
“And then he did call,” she says.
That stops me. “What are you talking about?” I say.
I almost faint. She spoke to Owen. She got to speak to Owen.
“You spoke to your father?” Grady says.
She looks up at him, offers a small nod.
“Can I talk to Hannah alone?” she asks.
He kneels down in front of her, not leaving the room. Which apparently is his way of saying no.
“Bailey,” he says, “you’ve got to tell me what Owen said. It will help me help him.”
She shakes her head, like she can’t believe she has to have this conversation in front of him. Like she has to have it, at all.
I motion for her to tell me, to tell us. “It’s okay,” I say.
She nods, keeps her eyes on me. Then she starts talking.
“I had just found this photograph of Dad, he looked heavy and his hair was so long, like shoulder length… like basically a mullet. And I just… I almost laughed, he looked so ridiculous. So different. But it was him,” she says. “It was definitely him. And I turned my phone on to call you, to tell you. And then I was getting an incoming call on Signal.”
Signal. Why does that sound familiar? It comes back to me: the three of us eating dumplings at the Ferry Building a few months back, Owen taking Bailey’s phone and telling her he was putting an app on it. An encryption app called Signal. He told her nothing on the internet ever goes away. He made some terrible joke about if she ever sends sexy messages (he actually said sexy), she should use the app. And she pretended to throw up her dumplings.
And then Owen got serious. He said if there were a phone call or a text she wanted to disappear, this was the app she should use. He said it twice so she took it in. I’ll keep it on there forever, if you never use the word sexy around me again, she said. Deal, he said.
Now, Bailey is talking fast. “When I said hello, he was already talking. He didn’t say where
